Multiple opportunities for travel

You may have noticed that I haven’t been blogging a lot lately. That’s because I have been doing a lot of stuff at work lately. I’m usually busy from the time I get in to the time I leave and when I get home, I just don’t feel like writing because I write so much during the day.

But as a consequence of all that work, it turns out that I have several opportunities to travel.

For you see, my manager and I (mostly me) made a list of conferences that were relevant to people on my team for the year 2013. These included conferences both within North America and also abroad. As our service moves into emerging markets (especially China) we need to increase our presence there.

Typically when I go to conferences, I usually ask my manager a few weeks in advance if I can go. The exceptions are the international ones where I ask a few months before, and even then I only ask if I am presenting at the conference. This time, we had a plan – we would make a list of all the relevant conferences for our team and get approval ahead of time so we wouldn’t have to “last-minute” it.

This is very similar to what the wife does. She makes travel plans 6 months to two years in advance.

On my team (I have been fighting spam for 8.5 years), I go to the most conferences because I ask the most, and I write up in detailed emails what I learned.

However, seeing as how I made up the list of conferences, it also puts me in a good position to travel more. I am not trying to go to every single one, but I won’t deny that planning them out works to my benefit.

So without further ado, here are some I am looking at:

China

We are looking for places go to in the China (or Asia region) and I just found out that there is a relevant conference in Beijing in April.

Vienna

There is a working group that meets three times per year, once on the west coast, once in Europe and once on the east coast. The European one this year is in Vienna in June. I’ve never been to the European one but it makes sense to go this year.

Berlin

Every year since 2009, in September or October, I have presented at a conference that alternates between Europe and North America. I have a pretty good chance of going this year but at this point, you may be looking through this list and see that I might start getting travel fatigue.

The wife and I were planning to go to Turkey after, but due to the two above we may rethink those plans.

Montreal

As if that weren’t enough, the conference above in Vienna meets a third time this year (the first was San Francisco in February) in Montreal in late October.

These are the most relevant work opportunities I have for travel this year. It interferes with the wife’s travel plans a little bit because she was operating on the assumption that I would only go to Berlin in October. But as it turns out, it may make more sense to go to these other ones.

I won’t get to go to all of them, but at the same time, now that I’ve done my homework on them we can make better plans.